The first meeting of the panel of the Information and Analysis Tools contest

12 september 2016

“The Best Research Tools 2016 contest aims to promote the development of analytical software, a very serious IT subfield that every executive body is currently looking into,” said Vladislav Fedulov, Head of the IT and Communications Department of the Russian Government and the chair of the panel at the contest, as he opened the first meeting of the panel. “For this reason every federal executive body will be interested in the tools that not only analyze information but produce actionable statistics for decision making.”

The Contest is being held from July 1, 2016 through January
27, 2017, its goal is to help identify existing information analytics tools,
promote the development of new ones and disseminate information about
information analytics tools that can be used for decision making purposes.
After the panel held its first meeting, it was announced that software
developers could now submit their applications to the contest.

“This contest aims to seek out companies and products that
we can rely upon when making important decisions,” Vladislav Fedulov said.
“There is another aspect to this contest that executive state authorities might
find interesting: we want to understand who will be submitting applications to
the contest, whether it is going to be primarily Russian developers or foreign
ones; how easy or difficult it is to work with our software or with foreign
software and consequently whether it is Russian or foreign companies that
deliver the best quality and that our customers would be most interested in
dealing with.”

Speaking of prospective customers that might find the
results of the contest most interesting, Vladislav Fedulov mentioned the
Finance Ministry, the Ministry of Economic Development, the governments of
major Russian regions, and went on to note that the Analytical Center for
the Russian Government will also be very much interested in these kinds of
tools at it has to process huge amounts of information.

The Head of the Analytical Center Konstantin Noskov believes
the contest is a useful development tool. “We have developed a good methodology
and we are now considering tools from any and all developers. The top priority
for us is that the tools we choose deliver the performance we need,” Mr. Noskov
stressed out. “Our experience tells us that we must prioritize quality
and performance. Last year we celebrated the 55th anniversary of the Analytical
Center, which was originally set up as the Chief IT Center of the State
Planning Authority of the USSR. Effectively, it was the first major government
organization in Russia that made heavy use of IT and that developed analytical
systems. I think that today we must continue to be the trailblazers as
well.”

Konstantin Noskov said that the Analytical Center is one of
the largest if not the largest organization in Russia that processes huge
amounts of data and that uses information analytics tools for this processing:
“We want to know ourselves what information analytics tools are in use today in
Russia and around the world and which ones are better for which areas of
information research and analysis. The contest knows no equal in terms of
scope. This year we are looking at products that could be useful for state
governance authorities and over the next few years we plan to expand the scope
to include information analytics tools that can be used by major state
organizations and corporations. So far nobody has attempted to conduct such
comprehensive analysis of information analytics tools.” The Head of the
Analytical Center also noted that they had managed to bring together a most
authoritative panel for the contest and participants can be rest assured that
their products will get the best possible evaluation by leading experts.

The event also featured presentations of a report by the
Organizational Committee on the start of the contest, the Regulation on the
Contest, the Methodology for Holding the Contest, list of participants,
partners and information partners of the contest.